Flash media has advantages over RAM and hard disk storage, namely that unlike RAM, flash media is persistent, and unlike hard disk, flash media provides much faster data access times, e.g., on the order of hundreds or thousands of times faster than hard disk access. Many applications thus may benefit from the use of flash media.
However, flash media is expensive, at present costing ten to twenty times more per gigabyte than hard disk storage. Further, flash devices are subject to reduced lifetimes due to page wearing, whereby small random writes (that also have relatively high latency) are not desirable. What is needed is a technology for using flash media that provides high performance, while factoring in cost considerations, efficiency and flash media lifetimes.